the PRL’s history, offers a possible key. ‘Remember General Jaruzelski’s biography,’ she says. ‘He and his family were transported to the Soviet Union, so he knew all about Soviet Stalinism and its crimes, in spite of which he built communism in Poland. Years later he became the Party leader. Human memory is selective; it rejects the things that hurt and retains the things that make life easier. Kapuściński’s family came from eastern Poland, where “everyone knew” who the Soviets were and what they did after 17 September 1939. The Kapuścińskis escaped to the General Government to avoid the Soviet transports to the East – how could Rysiek not have known what that system was like? He knew it all. But as Comrade Gomułka used to say, “A man only knows as much as he wants to know”.’
I lay this key beside ‘Konwicki’s key’: that it was not so hard for young people to accept the communist proposal for a better way to run the world, especially as the old one had ‘led to a hecatomb’. There was exhaustion following the war, then there was agricultural reform, the enthusiastic drive to build Nowa Huta – the forerunner of a better world, and efforts to eradicate illiteracy, in which the young ZMP activists played a leading role.
To understand why so many young, talented and sensitive people felt ‘mightier by force of Stalin’s mind’ requires exercising the imagination, especially when the privilege of being born later comes into it. Osiatyński’s words come to mind: ‘I never judge anyone who lived through the war and Stalinism.’ How would any of us, who were born much later, have behaved? Which side would we have been on? At the same time, it is harder to understand, and to walk in someone else’s shoes, when years later the people of that era – like Kapuściński – so desperately want to forget, to wipe out and erase all traces of the past, because that suggests they cannot find any positive explanation for their earlier commitment.
When Kazimierz Wolny-Zmorzyński, now a Jagiellonian University professor specializing in literature and the mass media, tells Kapuściński towards the end of his life that one of the books about him includes biographical elements concerning, inter alia, the evolution of his political views, he erupts:
‘You’re not going to go rummaging about in my life story!’
Kapuściński threatens to take him to court, even though the man is an expert on his work.
Stalinism in Poland is the first revolution Kapuściński witnesses – he experiences it at first hand as an active participant, a youth activist, a propagandistic reporter, and a committed poet. The revolutionary cause, an obsession with great social change and with the collapse of the old world and the emergence of the new – the attitudes of people in such times and in extreme situations will become the leitmotifs of Kapuściński’s life; they will stir his passion to discover the world and will be the driving force behind his entire future literary output.
In a way, the romantic reporter running about the world in pursuit of revolutions, rebellions and liberation movements is born in the Stalinist era in Poland – a sinister one in view of the terror, and yet for many people a time full of hope that they will succeed in building a just world free of hunger, wars and poverty. This paradox of revolution, the internal rupture of great political shocks, will become an intrinsic part of the reporter’s life story and of the attitudes of the man who made his intellectual, professional and practical choices in the Cold War era, amid conditions under which his own country’s sovereignty was limited.
10
Alicja, Maminek, Zojka
He looks at her once, then a second time. He invites her to the cinema, perhaps the Stolica in Mokotów; she can’t remember which film it was. It is autumn 1951, the start of the academic year.
At ZMP meetings she sits in the corner with her girlfriends, chatting and laughing. Colleague Kapuściński, a very important ZMP activist, sits at the presidium table, sermonizing about class enemies and increased vigilance, and occasionally he hushes the giggling girl: ‘Colleague Mielczarek, stop talking!’
‘He had a naughty look in his eyes,’ she says. ‘That was how he let me know he was watching me.’
They meet at university parties. She waits for him because, after all, he’s an activist. A revolutionary is always having to rush off and see to something or advise about something – a revolution is no joke, it’s hard work from dawn to dusk. He is late for their dates, and when he finally turns up, they start to tango. Their male and female friends form a circle around them, but as they gaze at each other, they don’t even notice.
They made friends at once in the first year of history. She was totally fascinated by him. He was so handsome, with thick, dark hair, fit and athletic, with a good physique, she remembers. He used to kick a ball about – he loved playing soccer.
‘You’ve picked up the best-looking guy in the year,’ her girlfriends say enviously.
She has come to Warsaw from Szczecin for her university studies, and she feels very liberated in the big city. One time, several girls are sitting in a café with their legs crossed, each smoking a cigarette. She is laughing and gesticulating. He sits down opposite. He looks at her, staring and staring, and shakes his head in disapproval. She pretends she hasn’t seen him and goes on chatting, but she swiftly stubs out her cigarette. She never smokes again.
Teresa Torańska, with whom I conduct a joint interview with Alicja Kapuścińska for Gazeta Wyborcza,1 says to her: ‘He only had to nod his head?’
‘No, he shook it . . . He didn’t want the girl who had caught his eye to be a smoker. In those days, young girls like me didn’t smoke.’
‘But he smoked, didn’t he?’
‘For over thirty years. Too long. He only gave it up in 1980, when Professor Noszczyk got him scared about it. You have clogged arteries, he told him, so either give up smoking or I’ll have to chop your legs off.’
Alicja’s parents, Mr and Mrs Mielczarek, came from Łódź. They had been to teacher training college and met as village teachers. They taught at one-class schools, and before the war had always lived in accommodation adjoining their workplace. Not knowing what else to do with her small daughter, Alicja’s mother used to take her into the classroom. With a very serious look on her face, the child would sit among the first-year pupils in the front row – and at barely three years old she started to read. Afterwards she was always very proud of being better at parsing the grammar and logic of a sentence than her brother, who was three years older.
The war caught up with them in the village of Józefów, where her parents taught, in territory which the Germans annexed to the Reich. The Mielczareks headed for the General Government, managed to get across the border and found a place to live in the Lublin area. Alicja spent the four years of German occupation in a small village with not much more than twenty houses and two wells a few dozen metres deep. She remembers a small barrel on a chain tied to the well shaft, with two buckets fixed inside it. The water was poured into the buckets and carried on a special yoke across the shoulders, as in Africa, carefully, to avoid spilling a single drop.
In the 1960s when she visits her gravely ill husband in Africa, where he is a PAP correspondent, their close friend Jerzy Nowak, a diplomat, will say: ‘Look how they carry the water here, Ala.’ She will reply, ‘I’ve seen that before, during the war, in the countryside near Lublin.’
After the war, Alicja’s parents left for western Poland, to settle in the so-called Recovered Territories. First they lived in Koszalin, and then Szczecin. Alicja went to a girl’s high school, where pre-war discipline prevailed and the girls wore a compulsory uniform.
Alicja
